I know you are in a hurry. You have a thousand tasks to get done today. I also bet that spending time on your landing page validation is not on your to-do list. When you do have time to spend on landing pages, you are thinking just about design and content. Research shows that you are like many other marketers. Digital marketers are unhappily spending more time on making unique designed landing pages for their marketing campaigns than on website optimization or SEO. However, not much time is spent on validation. Before you say you have no time to spare, here are some research stats for you to consider:
- Approximately 2% of undelivered emails are due to the addresses having been entered incorrectly in the first place by consumers (Marketingsherpa, 2013)
- Around 15% of bad addresses on email lists are due to dead or invalid domain names (Marketingsherpa, 2013)
- Upwards of 30% of consumers change their email address per year because they have switched ISPs (Marketingsherpa, 2013)
- Over 20% of all email lists contain typos, syntax, domain or other errors (MarketingProfs, 2016)
Is there any relief to this landing page burden? Yes! Pardot has provided some easy-to-use email validation that will make your landing pages better without any additional time on your part.
Validate Email Addresses on Form Submissions
On your Pardot forms, you have three choices to validate email addresses. Simply select one of these options on the Data Format dropdown while editing the form.
- This is the basic validation provided. It will ensure the value entered on the form contains only a properly formatted email address.
Email with valid mail server
- This includes the basic formatting validation as described above. It also checks to see if the email provided is tied to a live domain name and email server listed in its DNS records.
Email not from ISPs and free email providers
- This provides the basic validation and valid mail server check described above. It also blocks emails from free email providers and ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast or Charter.
Test Your Knowledge
Below are some scenarios to help you determine which type of email validation to use.
Scenario #1 – You have created a landing page to capture leads from digital ads you are running on Facebook and LinkedIn (only for those living in USA)
Answer: Email with valid mail server. You want to ensure the email is valid, but also recognize that many will be entering their personal email addresses which may be Gmail or their ISP.
Scenario #2 – You have created landing pages for your sales and marketing team for their B2B campaigns
Answer: Email not from ISPs and free email providers. This validation ensures that you will receive someone’s work email address rather than a personal one. (If your campaigns focus on SMB, be sure to check that your customers are not using Gmail, Yahoo or another free service beforehand.)
Scenario #3- You plan to use a Pardot form to capture leads at your trade show booth
Answer: Email. At many events, you need to capture information quickly but have a poor internet connection. This validation runs the fastest and still ensures the email address is entered in a correct format. If you have better internet access, you can always use the other validations as well.